You're listening to Ruthie's table for in Partnership with Montclair. Imagine going to a close friend's birthday months after the death of your son. Imagine realizing it was too soon and telling the man you're talking to, who you hardly know, why you need to leave. He takes your arm and he insists on seeing you to the lift. Then he goes down with you until you get to the street. This becomes a ten minute walk to the car park, a climb up the stairs, him holding your hand tightly,
until you find your car, driving off. You see him in the rear view mirror, waving good bye. I was this woman, and Tom Hollander was this man, and his act of tenderness and compassion has stayed with me for thirteen years. There are many stories about Tom Hollander. The best ones are told by him, not least his life in the Day for the Sunday Times, the best in a great ever written. He is a fantastic actor White Lotus Patriots, most recently captivating audiences as Truman Capote in
Feud Capote versus the Swans. He sings beautiful songs to a six month old son. He's passionate about what he cooks and what he eats. Yesterday he sent me a photograph with no caption, of fran Hickman with a large stainless steel saucepan obscuring her face, drinking the contents. Imagine being me in the River Cafe with Tom Hollander on a Tuesday afternoon, talking about memories of food, memories of friendship, family and all he is doing. Then imagine how special
this feels. And it's true, I remember that, and it is something that stayed with me for years. But what is really staying with me is spaghetti with peas and pascutto.
So ingredients untagrams of butter, one small red onion, chopped, three hundred grams of peas, sea salt and ground pepper. One loaf of garlic, thinly sliced, two tablespoons of chopped flat leaf parsley, three tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, one hundred and fifty grounds producto slices torn into pieces, three hundred grounds of spaghetti, fifty grounds of freshly grated parmesan. Heat the butter in a heavy frying pan over a
medium heat, Add the onion and fry until soft. Add the peas, and salt and pepper, reduce the heat low and cook for five minutes. So that's the thing about peas, I know quite sure. Mostly we cook frozen peas, don't we, And you can pretty much just sort of put them in water for about a minute and then they're ready. But these peas fresh, so you cook for longer. That's why they they take five minutes of cooking.
Yeah, it depends really what part of the season you're in. When you have the very very small pieas, you hardly have to cook them at all, I see. And then you know, the tougher they get and the larger they get, you might not use them in a pasta sauce because you want them to be cooked down and really part of the softness of the pasta.
But so these were new seas, fresh fresh peas. So you've added the peas and the salt in the pepper, and you reduce the heat to low and you cook it for five minutes, and then you add the garlic, parsley, produter and olive oil. You cover and cook over a low heat for fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, bring a large saucepan of salted water to the boil, add the spaghetti and cook until al dente. Add the spaghetti to the pe mixture, stir well with a spoon. Stir in the pasta water,
and top with parmesan cheese. Serve immediately.
So you've just made this in the River cafe. What was that like?
I watched Joseph. It was thrilling because I haven't ever seen somebody who knows really what they're doing that close up. It was also delicious and made me want to go and cook. It's good to watch, isn't it.
It's good to actually see something being made rather than always reading.
Yes yes, and to see his hands move someone who's done it for years, so it becomes like a dance.
Have we ever cooked on stage?
I don't. Oh, I feel like I did. When I was a child actor. We did sausages. We had sausages in It was called Captain Styrick and it was one of the greatest shows that the Children's Music Theater, which is I think now called the National Youth Music Theater National Youth Music Theater created. It was a brilliant dark ballad opera. It was called and we were all ragged Children, Dickenzie and Beggar children in Bartholomew Fair, and there was a and Captain Styrick was the young It was the
young kid who was our leader. There was it wasn't fake in like, it wasn't Oliver Twist. It was actually darker. And Captain Syrih went mad, Julian Sylvester. He was called, if you're out there, Julians Soversity, you were unforgettable. Anyway, maybe he's listening, maybe he is. I hope he is somewhere. And we oh thirteen fourteen, and we did it on the stage of the National Theater in what was then
called the Cottaslow Theater. And we had sausages which we cooked on a we I mean, I don't think we really cooked them, but we were as if cooking them. And then we got to eat them, and you know, it was quite fun to have something to eat halfway through the second half. I remember that, yeah, And I sing a song from that was it? I sing that kit our son. I've seen it to him. Now, many a man has left this land on a boat that's
bound for Botany. Why should he grieve? He could be leaving a life of meal and not any you'll boast and brag of the deed he's done to avoid the nag of the hungry sun. But he's been undone at the feast of fun and it's botany Bay for him. So do you.
When you're on stage, does your schedule for eating change?
I try to eat in the day before the biggest meals in the afternoon before the show because it's quite athletic.
So what time would that be if the place starts at seven.
Then three or fours? Yeah, you two or three or four and then go to sleep, yeah, and then do the show. And then if there are people in then you and you find out you're going out to dinner.
Then you have to have fish and vegetables and try not to eat all the chips and all the rest of it and that nose Masnez the last play, I would have a fanaffel salad in the dressing room without leaving between shows, because that you just need carbohydrate and fuel and then go and you'd try to eat a bigish breakfast on a mass in a day, but that in between showday I would buy it before I'd take it in, put in my fridge, eat it, go to sleep. That was a ritual that was very good.
Would you drink. Would you have alcohol if you are going on.
Stage between shows? Yeah? No, never, no, though everyone No, I tried to. I tried all of those things in my twenties, and they it's a mess. It affects your timing and your memory and your speed and your reactivity. Don't you can't. It ruins it. But in the olden days.
I remember Oliver Cotton telling me that he remember it was very strange in the mid eighties at the National everyone stopped drinking during the show, and he said, if you were on stage with Paul Schofield and you were downstage center, you would expect to smell whiskey on his breath. So they were just they were just used to it. I think it didn't They would drink so much more in those days that it just didn't affect them in
the same way. But obviously alcohol, a small amount of alcohol or a small amount of any intoxicant allows releases your imaginative stuff and makes you relax. When I played the violin at school, I would always find concerts very tense making, and I discovered that having half a half of a glass of beer allowed me to play better in a concert situation, just because I was so racked
with nerves otherwise. But the association between, you know, being artistically brilliant and being intoxicated has got an awful lot of people into terrible trouble over the years, not least of whom Truman Coupoti.
We could talk about Capoti and women and food because those women a lot of so many scenes in restauran. Right, they went to lunch every day.
You're right, But I wonder if they skin he was their job. Yeah, they drank. I think they drank and smoked. They drank and smoked and and sort of died young. Yeah, perhaps they were celebrating being in the inn crowd and being at the table, the best table in the best restaurant. And yes, they were restraining themselves. He couldn't stop, he couldn't control his appetite. And he loved cooking. He loved he loved his own kitchen. Yeah, in the South was yes, yes.
And the black and white ball they served his, you know, the black and white ball sort of apotheos. The black and white ball was a ball that Truman Capoti threw in I can't remember when the very early sixties, on the back of In Cold Blood, which had made him hugely famous, and his obsession with sort of high society and his own celebrity came together in one glorious moment, and he created the guest list to beat all guest lists that have ever existed, so much so that people
knew about him were fighting to get on it. And aristocrats flew from Europe. All the film stars, you know, Frank Sinatra, Mia Farrow, the Anneli's the probably Mick Jagger, we can ask him. They all turned up to the plaza and he gave them corn beef hash, which he remembered fondly from Monroeville, Alabama, where he'd grown up. But they all complained about the budget of the catering that it was very small. For him, it was about getting them in. They were the decoration, They were the party,
their dresses, their masks, but there was nothing there. There were some balloons and some rather dodgy food that neither wanted, and I think the party ended relatively early, and a whole bunch of them went gambling.
Was it like filming that scene? Did you do it?
They recreated it in the place, and Zach Posen had
done the dresses for the ladies. It was amazing that was, and there was there's a sequence in it if people he did it emotionally for his mother, we think, we think those of us who made that show because his mother wanted to Truman's mother, who'd abandoned him when he was four, then married a man called Joe Capoti, who gave him his name, Truman his name, but who was a He was a sort of he was dodgy, his finances were dodgy, and she nearly made it herself into
Upper east Side society. And then Joe Caboti was revealed as being sort of bankrupt and hopeless. It all fell apart and she killed herself, and then Truman had this ball to kind of to go, look, Mum, I've done it. I've done it for us. Every noone wants to be here. They've all got to be here. And in our version of it, episode three of Feud Capodi and the Women.
In our version of it, his mother comes to him as a ghost in the ball, and what Lee Radswell sees is Truman dancing drunkenly on his own and Lee Radswell looks across looks across the room, Callista f Lockhart looking at him sadly going look at the Paul sod. He's just a drunk. And then the final scene of the episode is in color and he's not dancing on his hand, he's dancing with his mum.
Did he he did?
Loves cooking. Yeah, he was addictive and compulsive. So he goes up and down. You see. We in our version we pretty much do fat Trooman because I couldn't in a TV schedule go up and down as much as I needed to, so we went with fat. Ryan Murphy said, you need to you need to put some weight, so I did, which was very enjoyable. Obviously less enjoyable trying to lose it again. How do you get weight? I've
done this a couple of times. I did it, and it basically you have to just eat all the things, the obvious things like pizza and ice cream and cornish pasties and chips, and then you get fat very quickly.
How does it make you feel?
And then it's marvelous in the moment, And then and I started to find it hard to put my socks on, and I got breathless doing sensible things I thought, easy usual, I mean ordinary things. That was that was distressing. So and also I'm a bit old to be messing around
with my weight like that. And furthermore, I've I have a little bit of a compulsion to overeat myself, and have spent all of my most of my professional life slightly going slightly slightly up in between jobs and then having a diet before a job, and going up and going down, and going up and going down, and trying to stay disciplined, trying to be like my father, who weighs himself every day and if he ever goes over eleven stone, he has a look at breakfast, he says,
I work. I know whether I can have a heavy or like retors, depending on what the scales it on every day? Does that which sounds like, you know, one of the Swans with its level of obsession, but he's he's eighty eight and still going strong.
You're saying before that putting it on was one thing, but you haven't told us about how you take it off.
So I went to a clinic, about half of it came off in an Austrian clinic, and then I really only lost. And then I went and did the play in which I was playing someone who needed to actually be a bit heavier than me. So I took me that was Patriots playing Berezovsky, who was quite portly. So I kept it on for that and that worked and then I only I only got it off about three months ago with the fear of doing the American breast junk.
It.
That motivated me enough to cut down on everything for a few weeks and it came off. And so I'm always trying to to, you know, discipline myself. But I do have a tendency to I love eating, but I also eat my feelings, you know, which which people do, and if you do it too much, it's it's it's not good for you. So I tried to do other things with my feelings.
Friend of mine, I was at a dinner recently where they were talking about a zempec. Oh yes, yes, and they were saying that, and it was kind of interesting to her. She said, really, what it's done for me, It's taken the noise of food away. It's taken all that noise. Should I shouldn't? I how much? When? And actually I understand that a lot, But I also think it's a kind of noise we do want in our
life as well. We like the noise of food, don't we we like the kind of thought of going to bed at night and thinking what am I going to have tomorrow for lunch or then?
And actually it's the noise of being alive, isn't it. It's the desire then, the fulfillment of the desire, that the creative process, the gathering of ingredients, the construction, the destruction, the kind of the clearing up afterwards, everything from the preparation to the end of it. It's all it's And it's a sort of I mean, you could, I could become pretentious if I'd say, but you know, it's a cycle of life, isn't it. But yes, But but to be at war with food, which you can be, is
not good. And I have I do have a sense of that because being you know, an actor, where you become inevitably obsessed with your appearance, you know, it has an a tendency to make you think, I mustn't need, I mustn't need, I mustn't eat, so I'm beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. It's never really made any difference. I met her. I met her an actor once in Italy who'd long retired.
He'd been a famous sixties heart throw quite famous. And I'm not going to name him, partly because it would be the wrong thing to do, and also because I can't remember his name. But he said I had to retire because I was sick of being thin and I wanted to eat. And he lived in the Italian hills near Cordona, and he loved food and he ate it. And he's probably no longer with us, but he was living the life of a you know, a bonne viver.
And I did sometimes think I'll get to a certain age and then I'll give up trying to not be fat, and then I'll just become a fat actor. Because fat actors they never stopped working. They're always there's always rumber, a fat actor in everything. Anyway, I can't do that. Orson Welles Well exactly, Dear Richard Griffiths, or you know, you sort of think they're they're loved. But I don't want to do that because I think I want to. I now need to live as long as I can.
For sure, we certainly shall, because you have a son I do. Did you know the River Cafe has a shop. It's full of our favorite foods and designs. We have cookbooks and then a Napkins kitchen ware toad bags with our signatures, glasses from Venice, chocolates from Turin. You can find us right next door to the River Cafe in London or online at shop Therivercafe dot co dot uk. What meals like in your house? Did you all sit down for dinner every night? Your sister and your sister.
Us, your cook and mom would cook and did you cook? His dad didn't cook then, but he did. He didn't cook when we were children, really, but he learned to cook once we left home and he loves cooking now. That's one thing that's maybe that's changed. I wonder whether
this was true. I was thinking about it, just that when I grew up it felt like, you know, mothers did the cooking, fathers did the eating, but that we've lived through a period where that's changed, right as sorry, mothers are working, mothers are working, so fathers are cooking, and then people like Jamie Oliver, scion of the River Cafe have taught everyone how that they can do it too, right. So but I have image of my father learning to cook, and then I am sort of learning to cook actually
the same sort of age, which is great. That's a that's a great development isn't it.
Yes, when you were growing up in your parents' house, your grandparents were nearby.
Were they they were in Devon? No, we were in Oxford, but they We used to go to them on the way to Cornwall every spring and every summer, and sometimes on the way back. And then towards the end of my grandparents' life he was living with us in Oxford.
Your grandfather who came from Germany with your father background, Yeah, Czechoovcia checkless.
Yeah, in nineteen thirty nine he came with my dad. Yeah.
And how old was your father three? Oh? I see, so your father came very early. Yeah, so the grandmother, grandfather and your.
Father nineteen thirty nine. Yeah, they made this epic journey across Central Europe and landed it marriage I think. Yeah. And they had sort of twenty five suitcases at the beginning of the journey, and they were thrown off one I won, reduced to about three by the time they got to the end. Any money they had left was there in my father's shoe, the toddler's shoe, and then they but they knew some people. My grandfather was ran
a radio station in Czechoslovakia. The music was in charge of the music, the classical music part of it, and a BBC producer had sent him this letter inviting him to come to give a talk about Yanichek as my father knew Yanichek and had written about Yanicheck and promoted Yanischeck and was a friend of his, and please bring
us your some expertise about Yanicheck. And that was what allowed them to get through because they had German accents, so people they were immediately people were suspicious of them.
Did they speak English at all?
My grandmother spoke quite good English, and my grandfather had to learn English. But they were you know, he was forty two or something forty He was born in eighteen ninety nine, So yeah.
They And as is your grandparents, did they cook for you?
They did a bit. I think my parents used to take over pretty much doing all the domestic things when they got there. We used to say it was Bohemian their life on it was technically Moravian. Happy food situations were in our home. I have very happy memories of our family suppers in which the day would be downloaded and we'd all share our experience of school. My parents were teachers, so we would all be talking about ask what had happened at school. They would be as well,
and I did miss that. That is that's one of the principal memories of growing up, is that moment of the day for sure.
So let's look at this point.
So this is a book that my mother made me when I was a student and sent me off to be a student with and put in a few of the favorite things that we'd eat and that she'd cooked us, and it was just sort of start us off. So this is when you went to Cambridge. Yeah, yeah, so nineteen eighty five. She would have made this for one So I was looking at a book. So she's written bon epitty and then she sectioned it into soup, fish, meat, miscellaneous. Under miscellaneous is tomato chutney.
And your mother grew up in Britain.
Yeah, yeah, well yeah, she grew up in Africa until she was six and then she then she was in England. But they're to rollo cross there. That's the sort of thing that we used to eat children. So well, it's Central Europe. It's Tyrilian. Actually it's Czech Austrian because they were so we did eat and dad, what's fascinating about because dad does not really that is that is an Englishman now, but when we go it's food. Food reveals about your origin. So he loves venishntsel, and he loves
apple strudle, which he now makes. He makes very good. And so Mum used to cook things o goulash we had we used to eat regularly, which I've recently learned how to make, which is I'm thrilled about because it's what meat do you use? Well, actually, mushrooms the last time, no meat. A vegetarian goulash because Fran is vegetarian. And then I secretly sometimes make it if Fran's not at home.
I made it with venison. We live in a bit of the country which is infested with deer, and people are always giving each other piles of venison out the deep freeze. So delicious. But terrolla crosl is torolla crosal is a sort of is a kind of peasant Alpine dish.
Cooked potatoes, potato and sausage. You have the cooked potatoes and then you're earning slammy ham and sausage.
Those are those are sort of oars either garlic sausage, just the classic okay, yeah, and.
Then you add the guy. Then the potatoes fry, add the meat to the ingredients, and cook for another ten minutes. That seems like a cook recipe for a college student, doesn't it.
Yes, And then it was then it was a bad recipe for an out of work young actor who didn't have enough to do and would go, well, I can fill the second half of the day with lunch and the consequences of lunch. I can fill it with the buying of the ingredients, the cooking of lunch, the over eating, and then the falling asleep. And that'll get me till that'll get me to PM program that would get me to five o'clock. No, but I remember making to roller Cross Limpeca.
Yeah, this is beautiful. If you liked listening to Ruthie's Table four, would you please make sure to rape and review the podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. You were doing theater ever since you were in the play in the National Youth Theater and new auditioned for this from the Dragon School.
Is that No?
No, it was at the next school. It was called Abingdon School. And yeah, this company used to go around schools and work in the school with the drama department for a term and create a show and then take it to the Edinburgh Festival. And we were all incredibly lucky. And from that I got They did one called Well Captain Syrick was the first one, which I think they'd
started at Haberdasher's Asks. All sounds very embarrassingly privileged, which it was because they were all I think independent schools.
Tiffins it started at, which is I think a sort of grammar school at that point, but it was actually that children Yeah, that National Youth Music Theater thing that I got picked up for a TV film a BBC Tikenzie and drama for children's theater in nineen eighty one called John Diamond, which was an adaptation of a Leon Garfield book, and that was so exciting to be picked up. I had a term off school. I was driven around in a car and I got given money and got to stay in a hotel on my own and eat.
I remember eating duck a la range on my age fourteen in a hotel in Tetbury and thinking Wow, this is the life. And that rather rewired my brain in a way that is either helpful or helpful because it meant sort of the end of ambition, or at least it meant the end of imagination. So I then thought, well, I must repeat this for the rest of my life and become an actor. So that was when I was fourteen, and then I went back school, went to university, and then yes, was always waiting to start acting.
Anyway, this is a report recently. Have you seen that the percentage of actors who've been to private schools is getting I think maybe, and so maybe this will change with their new government. But the investment in state schools to culture where we could get political, but it is true that you know it is it is part of education and part of a miniority of a society to find the kids who.
Have all the sixties heroes, all those actors that Albert Finney's.
And Michael Caine.
Yeah, they were all the Terrence Stamps and the petro'tools. They weren't privately educatd.
But Michael Caine said that he was not allowed he was Yeah, I think he was not allowed or he it was a real triumph when he was able to play a military man with a Cockney accent, because.
That was not I see, I see, yeah, no, but that that was of course exactly.
I think that's another theme that has gone through. You know, we talked about Grandmother's cookie, but we also talked about people, particularly in the arts they see, being able to eat the food that they want drink the wine that they would like to have as a measure of their success, you know, discovering that food, what food could be? Did you have that or did you know?
Yeah? I did?
And when was that?
That?
Will you describe him?
In a hotel fourteen?
So still that was all the memories you have, choosing the eating one.
You're right, I did, I repeatedly did it that the twenty or thirty? Is that I in which I mean? It came to a head when my accountant said that when I went for that meeting that you have with your accountant at the end of the year where they they tally everything up, he said, you as you eat every single night in a restaurant, And I said, do I am sure it can't be true, and you know you do pretty much five out of seven men, you
know you're doing that to you? And no, But I think I was definitely experiencing that thing of going I can I can celebrate the fact that at least it's working out sufficiently to allow me to do this. And and yes, regularly celebrating the fact that it's it's okay by ordering something slightly more than you ought to.
Is that where you put so? Is that where you spent? He's noticed that. Did he also say you've bought too many clothes, You've got so many taxis?
No, I would say it was food. It was that. Yeah, yeah, it's restaurants.
We did that when Richard and I lived in Paris. It was when the days when you had check books and checkbook stubs. Yes, and you know, we flow through it, you flick through it, and every stub was the name of a restaurant or a food chop. It was it went to the food.
Yeah. Well, at this moment, in this conversation, it feels like a wonderful thing to have done. I sometimes think, ooh, ouch, maybe I could have just now I'm in a phase. Now we're in this sort of the world has changed and that's not the way I live anymore. And also now we have a child, and so the family dinner thing is suddenly becoming exciting, you know, And so that that little vignette that we were just talking about the family supper that's suddenly becoming the kitchen table, the home
cooked food thing that's all suddenly becoming the new aspiration. Also, the world has changed, and so swaning about jumping out of cars going into flashy restaurants doesn't feel quite right anymore. But I'm looking forward to, you know, cooking our child, fish fingers and peas, that joy and catch up. I'm looking forward to all of that.
Food is about your father and your grandfather coming from Czechoslovakia. Food is about sitting at the table and your mother's book that you know, this beautiful book that your mother gave you as a gift to tell you what to cook and what to eat, is almost like she was coming with you. It also is comfort. So to finish what has been a glorious, imagine day, I would ask you, Tom Hollander, to tell me if you need comfort, if you have to go to food for comfort, is there a food that you would choose.
Well, I'm in a sort of desert island, dissy way. If I had to reduce it, if I had to take, if I was allowed the one food to comfort me, I would take my mother's actually grandmother's chutney recipe.
Do you want to read it?
Sure? Three pounds of tomatoes, one pound of onions, half a pint of vinegar, malt very important. I try to make it with refined more viger. The other they didn't work. One tablespoonful of curry powder, one tablespoonful of dry mustard, one and a half tablespoonfuls of cornflour, a pound of sugar, seven dried chilies. But the chilies you can put far more in. Some people like it very hot, some people don't.
Corner of teaspoonful of cayne pepper salt, two tablespoonfuls of salt, and you cut up the tomatoes and the onions, and you sprinkle the salt, and you leave them overnight. That's the long bit, and you let them do some chemical thing and it smells very strong the next morning, that mixture. And then you pour in the vinegar and you add the sugar and the chilies and the cane. You boil for half an hour. You mix the curry powder of the mustard and the corn flowers, and you get a
paste and a little vinegar. You add it to the rest slowly and you stir it in, stir it in bit by bit boil for five minutes, stirring all the time, and then you put into bottle and seal and you take the chilies out before bottling if you don't want it too well. And it's absolutely the most delicious jompney I've ever had. And and you can you know, have it with cheese. Obviously you can also stir it into risotto. It's you could probably put a blob on. You can put it on anything. I love it.
What would you bring me one next time?
Okay, I will, I will, I should have done that, I will bring.
Okay, thank you, thank you, beautiful time.
Thank you. How many a man has left this land on a boat that's bound for Botany? Why should he grieve? He could be leaving a life of me, not any.
Thank you for listening to Ruthie's Table for in partnership with Montclair.
Ruthie's The Table four is produced by Atame Studios for iHeartRadio. It's hosted by Ruthie Rogers and it's produced by William Lensky. This episode was edited by Julia Johnson and mixed by Nigel Appleton. Our executive producers are Fay Stewart and zad Rogers. Our production manager is Caitlin Paramore and our production coordinator is Bella Cellini. Thank you to everyone at The River Cafe for your help in making this episode.